Not from my point of view. At the moment this (for me) is a killer feature. I am waiting who introduces it first into their professional tool (Adobe for Lightroom, or Apple for Aperture). Although I like Lightroom better, I would decide to buy a Mac and Aperture if they come along with this first.

I don't even think that face 'recognition' is the crucial aspect, but face 'tagging': the ability to mark a face (person) and tag who's who. Of course you can create a tag for the people in a certain photo, but this does not do the same. As soon as you have two people in the photo it is impossible to identify them without knowing them.

To group photos (semi-)automatically according to who's in them is (just like GPS) one of these crucial tagging features the Lightroom team does not seem to be interested in. And while I can easily use an external tool for GPS, there is no standard as where and how to store 'faces' in the metadata and unless your primary DAM program (i.e. Lightroom) offers a solution it will remain something you cannot use.

I am not willing to switch to iPhoto, but I would be willing to switch to Aperture, so please, introduce this for Lightroom.

I have hoped for this since the first release of LR.
Amazingly enough there haven't been much interest in this before.
Hopefully that will change now that Apple has the technology.
I would love if LR had face recognition - but also the ability to add keywords with the most dominant color/s in an image.
/Andreas

This feature would help me to search trough my mass of photos. In few years while i tag the photos in import (don't have time to tag everyone) it's sometimes a bit hard to find photos. Automatized tagging features will be the solution to categorize the huge photo masses. I mean in few years i won't remember anymore when this and that happened which is now the primary search parameter which i use together with approx tagging.

Face detection at least like in picasa would help finding photos. This could be used to separate people shots from landscapes and architectural etc photos.

Also color detection would be great tool. If you remeber that you have taken a great landscape photo at sunset and that photo had mainly orange color, but don't remember the location or associated place. You could just search for that tone of images. It's in use in many stock photo agencies.

@bokeron2008
And as I said previously: the important thing is not 'automatic' face recognition. The important thing is face tagging.
Of course I can tag people on a picture, but I cannot tag _where_ on the picture they are. There should be a meta-data standard as quickly as possible for this kind of information (before everyone creates their own) and Adobe does have the kind of 'authority' to set a standard.

Also, you do realize that this will reach 'CSI level of perfection' in the near future, don't you? Nevertheless, the first versions of such a feature will make many mistakes - but if, in the early 90s, you had expected Adobe to work on Photoshop until it reached CS level of perfection...

I also would love this feature.
Face detection is already available in photoshop element since version 4.
It already makes tagging people much faster since it is scanning the photos, extracting the faces from the background, and then group them so that you can tag them.
Quite efficient

Next step would be of course to recognize the faces, group them by recognized person, order them by degree of confidence in the recognized face, and let YOU tag them. (that way you can mistake faces by yourself :) )
Of course the computer not reach the humain level (at least I do not expect this to happen for a fair number of year)

the other advantage of face recognition is that the computer has indeed detected where in the photo the face was (as grovel said)and this could be used to label the photos (because after 20 years I am rather unable to tell who is who on my old school photo group even if I have a list of name with me). This feature directly rejoin the one in the following discussion : Photo Tagging like social networks do
I think not only faces should be labeled that way but anything.

@bokeron2008,
Opencv an open source librairy to recognize faces, won one of the DRAPA great challenges.
So we may believe it must have been quite near the csi level of perfection if not better. This librairy can also freely be used in close source application without having to reveal or pay anything.
So I am confident that lightroom has access to a CSI level of perfection

I agree that Face recognition is one of the features that are right up Lightroom's alley. I've been looking at the other "feature requests" and I see that a lot of them really belong in other CS products, however, face recognition is probably one of the key features that will make or break an image catalogue program. I haven't used iPhoto but I've been wanting to. I work in media production and I have a massive library of images that have not been catalogued by subject and I can see as being a very useful feature. Not only to retrofit our current catalog but also to go forward with the hundreds of photos we get each week.

There are things that belong in Photoshop, others in Illustrator, InDesign and even Fireworks, and Face recognition definitely needs to be in Lightroom for it to remain relevant.

I will SECOND (or is the THIRD) this motion!!!! Taking a lot of "people" picture requires a lot of time keywording... If we had some method of doing this automatically it would be great. It would be nice if could contain a "face" database, such that I have a photo of a person when they are 3 years old and when they are 30 and it should know that they are the same person.

After playing with this feature in latest Picasa release, I too would like to see this.

Yes, it can make mistakes... but in Picasa it doesn't ACTUALLY tag the image until you let it, its just suggestions. And the more you tag the better it seems to get. Other nice thing is it crops to the face... there were many pictures where I may never have tagged the person if going through manually, but it found them.

Again, yes its not perfect... (and CSI is not real by the way ) but it would be a timesaver for those with large collections just beginning to use keywords, or for people like me who have been put off by keywording because of Lightroom's clunky and non-intuitive keywording (and searching) interface. [I like the power of keyowording panel when I need it, but PLEASE make it as easy to do 'AND' searches as it was in Photoshop Elements.... and if you don't like it, you don't have to use it... not talking about taking anything away, just new usability features.]

Can I just say I'm disappointed. (Actually I'm going to say a little bit more)

It is beyond me how the Lightroom team can miss this trend (and geotagging).

Usually, the answer I get when I mention this in forums is: "Lightroom is a tool for professionals" -- I don't think so. It is both priced to appeal to a larger audience, and the people who own a DSLR (most of which are not professionals) do use lightroom or aperture. I realize that 'professionals' usually shoot models (and hence a keyword is enough), but 'amateurs' don't -- for any 'reallife' photography both geo- and face-keywording are essential.

If I did not already have my photos in Lightroom - I would (at the moment) probably use picasa to organize them and rawtherapee to develop them. Both are free and there really is not that much more (for the millions of 'amateurs') in the new Lightroom.

It has bothered me from the beginning, but I think it is now slowly crystallizing that Lightroom is never going to be innovative when it comes to organizing your photos. Version three - there really is no excuse! It speaks volumes, that if I try to find a photo in my collection (28'000 files, shot over twenty years) I use explorer and my memory, rather than Lightroom (although I spent weeks carefully organizing photos).

Anyway, I don't think I will update, and am seriously considering getting off the Lightroom train before my data is totally shut in.

YES!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!! Face recognition. It's pretty sad when all the free versions come with it and Lightroom does not. I'm not sure if I'll ever upgrade or just keep using picasa to organize my family snap shots.

I think that face detection will be available in Apple Aperture. Why? Because it's already available in iPhoto. It's a guess, but I think it will be there. Aperture X (3.0) will be available in Q1/Q2 2010 - there are already books prepared for Aperture X. For example here, scheduled for May 26th, 2010.

And switching from LR to Aperture? Hmm, it depends on your preferences, but Apple Camera Raw is updating slowly - for example today's update brings support for cameras like Nikon D3s, D300s, ... Slow, very slow. Next thing about Aperture is that everything is cooked behind doors. No public betas, ...

I personally dislike LR's UI, crazy shortcuts and forced workflow (Library -> Develop -> ...). I like Aperture's way, I'm using it, but because of slow updates, quiet Apple, no public beta, ... I'm considering switching to LR3 for new projects.

Count this as one more vote for face recognition and tagging in Lightroom. The feature in Picasa 3 is very impressive, and I was wondering why Adobe hasn't implemented it in Lightroom.

When the computer can automatically group all photographs that contain a particular person's face, that is an extremely efficient organizing aid for the Lightroom user. E.g., I have innumerable group shots, tagging them all is a tedious chore.

I too think Face Recognition can be a handy tool. But I think the workaround existing since IPTC does is fine for most and with an efficient captioning tool (sorry I never used LR for this since I very much prefer Camera Bits' Photo Mechanic for this) it is way faster to put "one guy (left) other guy (center) third guy (right) into the caption than to mark all faces with the mouse than enter all the names and skip what needs to be skipped or mark what has been marked. But to help technology evolve it still could be added as it is implemented in iPhoto, Aperture, Picasa, and even Facebook.

Grover: I agree you with the need - or a least advantage - to be able to have the face recognition and the geotagging.

But I completely disagree you on professional photographers ONLY shoot models. I think event, sports, news, documentary and nature photographers are professionals as well and they could very much use both face recognition and geotagging (more or less of course depending on their working area and its needs). And maybe to them it could be even more of a help than to a hobbist. But my point is your arguing is mistaken in regards it could help for all if LR would have this.

rvojta: Apple Aperture 3 is allready out and it does have both Faces and Places (ie. geotagging). It does both quite well, but they too have place to evolve especially with face recognition I think.

Regarding switching to Aperture I think it isn't worth for me. Faces and Places don't give me that much, and even the more advanced Aperture 3 is way too slow on my MacBook Pro compared to LightRoom. I like Apple's interface much better. But in details I prefer most of Adobe's controls. And after all the speed issue once made me choose LightRoom, and now it makes me stay with it.

I only wish for LR to allow me forget the Library stuff and allow me just import and develop my photos.

I would like to add my vote for face recognition (assuming that Adobe reads these forum posts...). This is one of probably several ways that automated, or computer-aided tagging can help in searching and virtual grouping of photos.

Picasa 3 face recognition and people tagging/grouping works well, and makes it viable to search photos for people, since manual tagging takes more time than is feasible (depending on the kind of photography done, and scale of the collection). Picasa 3 often finds known people in photos where I hadn't noticed they were present...

Personally I find that Picasa 3 works better and is easier to use than Aperture 3 for this function.

I would like to add my vote for face recognition too. It's not a deal breaker but it would make life a lot easier. Noise correction in Lightroom 3 is so good and really bad in Aperture that is stop me from switching to Aperture. Even if "Face", "Place" and "Book" (portrait orientation is a must for a book module), are missing in Lightroom and it's a big deal for me, quality come first.

I second this - definitely need face recognition. I know a lot of guys are going to be "pros" and will think it's unnecessary but to the advanced amateur, it's mandatory.

Adobe, please don't believe the fallacy that by keeping face recognition out of LR3, that will make people buy Elements 8 as well. I certainly won't. Currently, I use Picasa to find faces, I then manually tag them, and then re-import the names into LR3 (Beta2). It's not the ideal workflow but Picasa does the job and it's free.

Just integrate face recognition into LR3 - copy the implementation from Elements 8!

I have been using the beta 2 for a few days and really like it. I am not a proffessional but have lot of pictures and would like to have this and other features you can find in the Organizer of PSE (Geotagging is the other one).

I totally agree that to have a standard that also identifies where the people is in the picture would be nice, but for a first release the same time of face recognition we have in the organizer would be very welcome.

I do not know if I got you correct, but I would say that I agree: Give us the possibility even if it is not automated at start.

It would be awsome to label an element of the photo: that is say where the things we label on the photo sit on the photo! Or put differently: not only say Jack is on the photo, but also where. (And I mean anything even objects).

For a free solution for face tagging using face recognition technology, check out Fotobounce. Available on Windows and Mac. The latest version has a peer to peer sharing solution that transfers full resolution images across a private peer network with your friends and family. You also get all the tagging info and face recognition data with each photo; so one person does the tagging and everyone benefits. http://fotobounce.com